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ibjhb writes "Google is at it again and has launched Google Code. It appears to be "Google's place for Open Source software". " Can't say that I'm surprised that our old friend (and former Slashdot Author) Chris DiBona is working on this one. They have links to several open source projects, as well as to Google API information.

You have a great point, but I wouldnt go that far yet. Freshmeat already has an installed use base of...... oh damn near everyone.

While google will have some great features (as they have done with maps and answers) I dont believe it will be enough to cause a mass exodus from Freshmeat et. at. But with their leveraging power they will surely be the next generations choice.

We won't have as many duped posts? Articles and links will be checked before they're posted? Grievous spelling errors will be corrected in the editing process? There will actually be an editing process?

On the other hand, there will still be a Cowboy Neal Option in the polls.

besides than that.. *Why are you releasing code through Sourceforge?
Well, because they were nice enough to oblige, and because developers here like Sourceforge. Future homes for new projects might include Tigris.org or language specific sites like the Vaults of Parnassus and CPAN. *

Yes - at first I thought this was going to be a search engine for source code, grepping through tons of free software. That would be a rather useful thing to have (how do I use this library? I'll just grep for an example). There is koders.com [koders.com] but its search engine isn't that gret - when looking through source code you need to be able to include punctuation characters and search by them.

All you really need to do is spider freshmeat.net, download the tarball of the latest release of each app, and do a mass

For koders I should have RTFM - you can search for most things, you just have to escape metacharacters with backslash. Perhaps it will be the thing to use; I just need to make sure all my own code is in there...

Code.google.com is our site for external developers interested in Google-related development. It's where we'll publish free source code and lists of our API services. A lot of people worked together to both prepare source code for release and prepare code.google.com for launch and ongoing maintenance. We really care about free and open source software (F/OSS) at Google, and this site is one aspect of that affection.

The cultural significance of Google's position on F/OSS software is their ace in the hole against Yahoo and MSN. That's not to say the technology needs a hidden ace, but only that the geek appeal toward Google will remain strong if they continue to "don't be evil," the highest manifestation of that being their willingness to share code.

Even more, releasing their code not only won't hurt them, it will actually help them. Google's revenue comes from ads not from selling software, sharing the code means other people can improve and help to maintain it.

When I first read the article blurb, I thought it meant Google was announcing some sort of source code repository, like SourceForge. Instead, it's a listing of their various open source projects.

That's cool, certainly, but nothing terribly exciting. Isn't this stuff that's already been floating around on the Google website? Or is this a quick-and-dirty attempt to match developer.yahoo.com [yahoo.com], which still looks to be more capable.

You may have heard about 20% time, in which Google engineers are encouraged to work on a personal project one day out of the week. Open Source interests a lot of Google developers, so we thought taking advantage of this program was a good way to prepare code for release and maintenance.

People at Google keep saying that they get ~20% time to work on personal projects. I'm curious about a couple of things here.

Does this 20% time come out of the normal 40hr/week thing (and for that matter, do these engineers work 40/week or are they doing 100/week and get 20% time out of that)?

Does Google or the developer own intellectual property developed out of that 20% time?

I'm not sure about the first question, but the answer to the second question is easy: Google.

They're paying you to develop ideas, they may be your ideas, but you're using company time and resources to create them (ie: you're being paid to generate the ideas AND they're financing the initial development effort), so the ideas are their property.

I'm sure someone can come up with some philosophical way around this, but if it ever went to court, the case would prolly be over pretty quick.

In that case, though, who would ever want to work on personal projects there? I know I certainly wouldn't.

I think you're missing the point of these personal projects. The point is to allow employees some freedom in what they do for the company, not to pay them to work on their hobbies. Google's goal is to allow the employees freedom to explore interesting ideas in the hope that some of those ideas may ultimately turn into things that will make money for Google. All of the work in question is on Google time, and belongs to Google, the only difference is that one day per week the employees get to pick what they want to work on rather than just doing what they're told.

This is a scaled-back version of the approach taken by the best pure R&D labs: Hire very smart people and then don't give them any specific assignments beyond "Do something new and interesting."

This is a scaled-back version of the approach taken by the best pure R&D labs: Hire very smart people and then don't give them any specific assignments beyond "Do something new and interesting."

Given the large number of major thing discovered by pure accident [bbc.co.uk]. Maybe you would be better off hiring a bunch of incompetent idiots and carefully watching what happens when you tell them do something difficult.

An engineer wanted something to mark pages in choir books at church. He found an adhesive that they'd previously dismissed as too weak to be useful, diluted it further, and now we don't have to paint our monitors and walls . ..

An engineer wanted something to mark pages in choir books at church. He found an adhesive that they'd previously dismissed as too weak to be useful, diluted it further, and now we don't have to paint our monitors and walls . . .

First of all, he was NOT an engineer, but a scientist. Second of all, the 3M inventor of the Post-It note, Dr. Spence Silver, was NOT looking for a way to mark pages at churg, but rather "looking for ways to improve the acrylate adhesives that 3M uses in many of its tapes". Spenc

While generally I would agree, the situation here is that the "mega-corporation" is letting you use 20% of *their* paid-for time to be a part of the R&D that interests you.

"Personal stuff" for me also includes photography, music, politics, blogging, etc. While those interests would likely influence I would spend my "20%" if I worked for Google, the "personal stuff" itself remains mine.

If you are paid as a software developer, it's not healthy career-wise to have all of your "personal stuff" also be pro

Does this 20% time come out of the normal 40hr/week thing (and for that matter, do these engineers work 40/week or are they doing 100/week and get 20% time out of that)?

I assume it's one day a week. And it's "their own projects", so I assume Google don't own them. It's to keep their creative minds bubbling away.
Mind you, that's an awful lot of assumptions I've just made.

Using the Google API is the best way to encourage its growth. The more apps that use it, the more those apps become "Google" - and the more Google will grow itself by growing its web services.

However, hosting all those Google API apps solely on Google is a bad move. Too many eggs in one basket. Better to host them on both Google AND Freshmeat/SourceForge. In fact, one great Google API app would be an automirror. Hosting at one is automirrored at the other. Which has immediate benefits in load balancing and uptime (no single point of failure). And longterm benefits of keeping the code free of capricious corporate decisions down the road

It is great that Google are visibly supporting the development of open source software - to whatever degree.

The ubiquity of google and the respect they have gained over the years make them somewhat of a model company. While im sure there may be a couple of people who might dispute their company motto to "not be evil" I think most people would agree that google seems to be doing things the right way.

Google is well thought of by anyone who uses the web, not just geeks, but the PHB's and Grandma's alike. This brings me to the next point...

Google have got Microsoft worried - frustrated that they couldnt "own" google they paid google the greatest compliment- they redesigned their search engine that is functionally more than just similar to google - and to a certain extent the low graphic - no-frills feel!

It is interesting to see Google innovating and re-thinking many of the ways we use the web. Now that google are being visibly more active in open source - It couldnt be better press for F/OSS at this time - and damn that's really going to p*ss Microsoft off - I'd like to see them match this idea. In addition to this its certainly going to help to legitimise F/OSS to those PHB's who have been toying with the idea but afraid to test the water.

Its going to be extremely interesting to see what google has deep in the bowels of its R&D department waiting to come into fruition. Lets hope that they can keep their face clean in the process!

damn that's really going to p*ss Microsoft off - I'd like to see them match this idea.

Microsoft has several open source projects on SourceForge, and in the past has hosted sites like GotDotNet that allowed users to share libraries with one another. Microsoft developers would also post libraries they had written and allow other developers to see and use the code.

You can see code that Google is opening up here [google.com]. My favorite is the perftools code [sourceforge.net] because it helps with things like heap profiling. Very handy stuff, and it's hosted with Sourceforge. I'm pretty sure these four projects were just added in the last day or so.

"We're going to feature a new one every week or so and we'll send a fabulous, always fashionable, t-shirt to the maintainers as a small way of saying thank you!"
anyone seen the pic. where a dud is holdig a poster that say "I well do html for food"

What I've been hoping for is a specialization of Google that would search for open source code and commentary/documentation on same.

So many projects have names that tend to return a lot of unrelated links when doing a search, it would be nice is there were a categorized search similar to that which they've created for Linux (NICE! Helps significantly. I've given it a browser link on my toolbar.).

Several people have commented that it is nice to see Google using an existing code site (sf) rather than create their own.

I'm also glad to see that they are using an existing and respected license (BSD 2.0) rather than invent their own. The other big companies (eg. Sun, MS) always have to create their own pseudo-FLOSS licenses when they release code, with their own little catches and gotchas.

and I anounce my new Russ Key [mozdev.org] FireFox extension that allows users to type in TextArea and Text HTML fields in phonetic Russian and translate 'translit' (Russian typed in English letters) into Cyrillic.

Why is it that people think this guy is great? He typically does NOT do a good or even acceptable job on anything he manages.

Chris DiBona is *the* guy that single-handedly killed themes.org.

For those of you who have not been around long enough to remember themes.org it was a wonderful, one-stop-shop for themes for everything. Until Chris took over that is, and then it went into a year and a half long dormant period where no updates were allowed by themers, only to eventually be folded into freshmeat when it was apparent that Chris was never going to deliver.

What's required in that case is decent in-code documentation - it's easier, for instance, to know that you want to search for "virtual memory cleanup mach" than to know that you want to search for "vm_object_cache_clear site:freebsd.org". Lots of LISP and Python contains embedded docstrings, Perl can contain embedded POD but I personally don't come across it that often. There certainly doesn't seem to be a single widely-used convention for embedding documentation in C or ObjC. I expect that with a useful

yeah, I was thinking, it'd be nice if they actually had links as to HOW TO GET STARTED CODING in OpenSource... I'm sure it'll come once there's a demand big enough for it, but it's not the first time a slashdot summary gets my hopes too high either...

It's not such a bad title. Although it's not the entire Google source code, it is part of it.

From the FAQ:

Are these programs still in active use at Google?

They aren't just in active use; they're in active development. These first projects are all current, actively maintained code straight out of our repositories, and as we improve them, those improvements will be merged into the free code base.

I remember complaining for months that/. didn't even have an icon for Google. Now I wish they'd make google.slashdot.org and get this stuff off the front page. Maybe take the place of Apache, which has had a grand total of one article in all of 2005.

You're right. After reading that, he certainly sounds like a douchbag to me. They should of just hired some muscle for a couple hundred bucks to kick the shit out of him. Amazing what that will do to arrogance.

I am beginning my self, and I can tell you what I am doing:
dont worry too much about the language at first. after you learn to program in general, learning a new language will become more or less trivial.

I surely recomend python. its great for beginners and you will be very productive with it.and it should give you the 'coding itch' this book [amazon.com] is great for beginners.. stay out of C and C++ as your first language though.

I think what's most interesting is that google released code to add functional language attributes to python.

Functional programming doesn't get a whole lot of attention, but if the guys at google are using functional-style programming so often that they feel it deserves a release on sourceforge, doesn't that make you wonder what you're missing in the land of procedural or object-oriented programming?

LISP might be the first functional language (among many other firsts) and has been around since the beginni